Category: Student News

Digital History Ph.D. Students Amber Edwards and Hallie Knipp have both won Summer Research Fellowships from Clemson University’s Humanities Hub!

Amber Edwards, a first year Digital History Ph.D. student, received funding to conduct archival research at Bowling Green State University’s Browne Library for Pop Culture Studies and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive. Edwards is a 20th Century U.S. historian of women, gender and sexuality – specifically interested in the music culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s in the context of radical feminism and mass American culture. These archives house a variety of zines – non-professional magazines often associated with fan culture of rock music and its offshoots – including some focused on the counterculture and feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Edwards is seeking to analyze how the gender consciousness of hippie women is portrayed within zines alongside the music and culture to explore where content covering hippie culture might intersect with publications expressing radical feminist ideology.

Hallie Knipp, a third year Digital History Ph.D. student, received funding to support research for her dissertation project, Mountain Labors: Contraceptives and Eugenics in Kentucky, 1915-1945. This research explores how birth control programs in early 20th-century Appalachia were shaped by intersecting forces of social reform, public health, and eugenics. Organizations like the Kentucky Birth Control League (KBCL) expanded reproductive healthcare access, but often with troubling motivations—especially through partnerships with eugenicists who sought to control who could and couldn’t access contraception. While some efforts empowered rural women, others targeted vulnerable populations, reinforcing racial and class-based hierarchies. With the support of this grant, Knipp will conduct archival research at the University of Kentucky and the Kentucky Historical Society, examining key collections such as the Alice Lloyd Caney Creek Community Center papers and the Family Planning in Kentucky collection. By mapping the geographic spread of these programs, this study will reveal the lived experiences of women affected by these initiatives—whether as reformers, patients, or those resisting imposed policies. This work sheds light on the complex history of reproductive healthcare in Appalachia and its lasting impact.

First year Ph.D. student Candace Boatwright has won the Lewis P. Jones Research Fellowship in South Carolina History from the Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. The award will fund Boatwright’s research into the social and political history of Unionism in upstate South Carolina. The Lewis P. Jones Fellowship provides researchers who are researching South Carolina History with the opportunity to conduct research at the South Caroliniana Library.

Second year Ph.D. student Lucas Avelar has been selected as a Mellon Data Fellow for the Freedom on the Move project. As a Fellow, Avelar will spend eight weeks this summer in residence at Cornell University and the experience will count as his internship for the Ph.D. program.

The Freedom on the Move project compiles stories of resistance from fugitive slave ads in newspapers. Through their online database and extensive metadata, the project’s represents “a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.”

As a data fellow, Avelar will work with digital humanists and scholars of slavery, resistance, marronage, and emancipation to help deepen Freedom on the Move dataset. He will also work with a faculty mentor to develop a research paper related to the project.

Second year Ph.D. student Hallie Knipp has been accepted to attend Columbia University’s Archives as Data Workshop this June in New York City. An exclusive NEH funded institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Knipp will spend two weeks learning to organize and analyze large document collections for textual analysis and will participate in several seminars with scholars in the field. The institute is jointly hosted by Columbia’s History Lab and Columbia’s Library.

The “NEH-funded program will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data… Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. All participants will come together in seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by doing archival research in the age of “big data,” including issues related to community representation, protecting private information in online archives, and the professional and scholarly pitfalls in navigating this new terrain.”